It’s funny how one scene can change your perception of a film – even stranger that it can do so retrospectively. Not too long ago, I had to bail out halfway through reading Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (‘the best novel of the year’ according to a couple of luminaries on the ABC’s Book Show). It followed the activities of a handful of typically privileged New Yorkers through their cloistered lives of desperate self-importance, but ultimately I didn’t give a rat’s about them. For a while, Rebecca Miller’s Manhattan rom-com threatened to leave me as cold as Yanagihara’s 700-page opus. Then suddenly, John and Georgette (Ethan Hawke and Julianne Moore) were in a lounge in Quebec where a Canuk duo was performing an acoustic version of Bruce Springsteen’s anthemic Dancing in the Dark. John and Georgette joined the crowd in singing along and took to the dance floor and, out of the blue, I was in love with the movie.
Maggie (Greta Gerwig), an ‘arts facilitator’, wants a baby but does not have a partner (a baby on the shopping list is the crowning achievement of Western materialism). She engages Guy (Travis Fimmel), a pickle maker, to donate his sperm, but soon after hooks up with John, an academic without tenure, who happens to be married to Georgette, a Norwegian anthropology scholar, with a couple of kids of their own.
A confusing time-jump finds Maggie with her own child and in fading conjugal bliss with needy, confused John, whose manuscript she is still editing. The potential for dreary cliché as she plans to reunite John with Georgette is ripe (Woody Allen has a lot to answer for), but Gerwig and Moore are so good in their severely contrasted roles – costume and hair stylists take a bow – that it is impossible to be entirely disengaged. I would have liked more of Fimmel, a magnetic screen presence with a sly comic gift, but the warmth generated by the night in Quebec was enough to lift this from the so-so to the endearing.
